Anaesthesia allows patients to undergo surgery and other procedures without the distress and pain they would otherwise experience. A variety of drugs, referred herein as anesthetic drugs, may be given to a patient to block sensation in the patient by ensuring patient's unconsciousness, amnesia, analgesia and paralysis during the surgery and for some time after surgery. The anesthetic drugs may be administered by a variety of routes, including by injection or by inhalation. To administer the anesthetic drugs by inhalation, the following steps are typically taken: the drugs are formulated to evaporate easily, the vapors of the anesthetic drugs are mixed with carrier gasses, such as oxygen or nitrous oxide, and the mixture is administered to a patient throughout the surgery from an anesthesia machine. During sedation, oxygen is administered to the patient via medical tubing connected to a nasal cannula.
During surgery, patients being administered anesthetic drugs are continuously monitored to ensure the patient's safety. One of the standard monitoring tools is a capnograph, which monitors the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the exhaled respiratory gases. Monitoring amount of CO2 in exhaled respiratory gasses, which is known as Capnography, provides one of the most rapid and reliable methods to detect life-threatening conditions, including movement of tracheal tubes, unsuspected ventilatory failure, circulatory failure and defective breathing circuits, and enables physician to circumvent potentially irreversible patient injury.
Some nasal cannulas may also include a built-in means for sampling exhaled respiratory gases for CO2. Such cannulas are, however, extremely expensive and cannot be afforded by many hospitals. Alternatively, a medical tubing connected to a capnograph may be simply positioned near a patient's nose by, for example, attaching the medical tubing to a nasal cannula, such as by tape. This method, although easy and inexpensive, suffers from a number of shortcomings. For example, the connection between the medical tubing and the cannula may be insufficiently firm so the medical tube may shift from the desired position during the surgery. In addition, taping the medical tubing may result in pinching the medical tube causing the flow through the medical tube to substantially decrease or, in some instances, to cease completely. Finally, this method of attaching medical tubing to a nasal cannula may also interfere with the position and operation of the nasal cannula itself.
Accordingly, there is still a need for a device for attaching medical tubing to a nasal cannula that ensures that the medical tubing stays in the desired position throughout the surgery without interfering with performance of the medical tubing or the nasal cannula.